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Virtual Water, Real Profits

"A typical meat-eating, milk-guzzling Westerner consumes as much as a hundred times their own weight in water every day," says Fred Pearce, former New Scientist news editor and author of When The Rivers Run Dry.

That's because it takes between 2,000 and 5,000 litres of water to grow one kilogram of rice, 11,000 litres to grow the feed for enough cow for a quarter-pound hamburger, 50 cups of water for a teaspoon of sugar and 140 litres of water to produce just one cup of coffee. The world today grows twice as much food as it did in the 1960s, but uses three times as much water to grow it. Two-thirds of all the water taken from the environment goes to irrigate crops. "This is massively unsustainable, and has led many people to conclude that the apocalypse wasn't averted, only postponed," says Pearce.

And the over-use of water doesn't just apply to food production. Every T-shirt you wear will take 25 bathtubs of water to produce. Every small car uses 450,000 litres. If what you wear or drive is imported, you in the West are helping to empty rivers across the world. Water used for growing food and making products is called "virtual water". Every tonne of wheat arriving at a dockside carries with it, in virtual form, the 1,000 tonnes of water needed to grow it, explains Pearce.

The global virtual-water trade is estimated at around a thousand cubic kilometres a year, or 20 river Niles. Two-thirds is in crops, a quarter in meat and dairy products, and just a tenth in industrial products. The biggest net exporter of virtual water is the US, which exports in grain and beef around a third of all the water it takes from the environment; Canada, Australia, Argentina and Thailand are all net exporters too.

Well, as Gazprom consolidates its grip on Russian gas it could be that we may need access to all that oil locked up in the oil shale somewhat sooner than the four years that Shell have said it needs before it can even decide if their process is viable (and I'll cover that in a later post). Now before I get into the piece that follows I should explain that I don't hold any particular animus towards the states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming or Idaho and so when I start talking about disposing of nuclear weapons in those states by making use of them it should be taken as merely a technical discussion (grin).

The need for a relatively rapidly available resource to allow us to continue being able to supply the worlds needs for oil, even as it increases into the future, will require some fairly rapid and agile production of resources, and as I noted in the first post of this series, with some 2 trillion extractable barrels of oil locked up in the oil shales of the above four states, there lies a potential answer to the problem. But conventional means for extraction, particularly the levels of capital required, and other issues that I will discuss later, make it unlikely that these normal means will produce any significant impact on the gap in economic supply that will develop in the near future. The use of nuclear explosives has the potential to solve that problem. And to explain, rather simply how this might be done (as with the other techie talks), I will explain how, conceptually, this might be achieved.

[editor's note, by Prof. Goose] Hey folks, see these buttons to the left? Note that they include reddit and digg. If you recommend TOD articles at these sites (account required, but they take seconds to set up, and once setup and logged in, all you have to do is click!), we can get more traffic driven over here! Do it for every article you think is worthy.

Update [2006-6-18 10:34:44 by Super G]: A large portion of this article was cut off when it was originally posted. I have just added in the rest.

I have recently noticed an increase in oil shale coverage in the media, so this seems like a good time to take a look at the potential for oil shale to meet a portion of our energy wants (as opposed to “needs”).

First, what is oil shale? Wikipedia has a nice overview on oil shale here. Briefly, oil shale started off just like the plant material that was ultimately converted into oil, but the material was not subjected to high enough temperatures and pressures to convert it completely to oil. But it is feasible to complete the process that nature started and convert oil shale into oil and natural gas by heating it. Given that the U.S. has an estimated oil shale reserve of a trillion barrels or so, it is not surprising that billions of dollars have gone into figuring out how to economically extract the oil from oil shale.